Gil Shaham often tells his children to take risks, try new things and not be afraid of making mistakes. But the renowned violinist realized a few years ago that he had not done a very good job of following his own advice, so he decided to break out of his comfort zone and develop an innovative twenty-first-century way to present Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001-1006).

“I think of this as a little bit of maybe practicing what I preach,” he said.

Shaham teamed with New York video artist David Michalek, who has created a group of short films to be projected on a screen behind the violinist as he performs the six works. The resulting multimedia collaboration will make its debut during a national tour timed to coincide with the 10 March 2015 release of Shaham’s recording of the complete Bach set on his Canary Classics label. The tour began 1 March 2015 in Chicago as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Symphony Center Presents series, continues in late March in California, and concludes 23 April 2015 with a performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I hope people come to see it with an open mind,” Shaham said. “Some of the images will surprise people. Some might shock people. But I found them to be mesmerizing and beautiful and very, very musical.”

Michalek has gained international attention for his multifaceted body of work, which includes large-scale outdoor installations, in which he projects super slow-motion films on giant screens. These projects have been shown in such high-visibility sites as Lincoln Center, Trafalgar Square, and Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. Among the best-known such works is Slow Dancing, which consists of forty-three video portraits of dancers and choreographers from around the world. Each subject was filmed using a high-speed, high-definition camera that records one thousand frames per second compared to the standard thirty frames. Because the resulting videos last ten minutes but show only five seconds of action, the movement is barely perceptible.

The artist has continued his extreme slow-motion techniques for this project, finding thematic links to Bach’s works without trying to specifically interpret them. The challenge was to create images for music never intended for such purpose and to make sure the two mediums complemented each other. Michalek asked himself such questions as: “What does it mean to couple this kind of pure music with an image? What can an image do? What can it do advantageously? What can it do problematically?”

Some experts believe the three pairs of sonatas and partitas relate to the New Testament stories of Christ’s Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection. Rather than attempting to directly depict the first of those, for example, Michalek chose to suggest new life by filming a budding six-year-old violinist playing her instrument, zeroing in on her face and tiny fingers. “That’s all it is,” he said. “That’s the image. So, while we hear Gil onstage, playing the heights of violin music, we see a little being on screen holding the same instrument.” For another section, he created a kind of filmed still life, with a crystal ball, skull, and just the movement of sand slowing dropping through an hourglass.

Like Bach’s six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12), the composer’s 1720 works for solo violin are considered among the most profound and expressive statements ever written for the instrument. Out of respect, Shaham postponed taking them on until about ten years ago, when he finally began performing them in public. “And then I learned what so many other musicians have said before – that there is really no greater joy than playing Bach,” he said. “When I go to my practice room, I’ll start practicing, and the time will just pass. Suddenly, it’s two hours later.”

As part of his activities while serving as the 2013-14 artist-in-residence with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, he performed Bach’s solo violin works as part of three chamber-music programs. Because the ensemble is one of two orchestras that operate under the auspices of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, Shaham decided to take advantage of its easily accessible recording studios and engineers to record the set last summer. “It seemed like a good moment to do it,” he said.

The album will be the fourteenth release by Canary Classics, the label Shaham founded in 2003 as a way to have the freedom to record what he wanted without the commercial pressures associated with larger labels. It has since issued recordings featuring the violinist’s sister, pianist Orli Shaham, and his wife, violinist Adele Anthony. “It’s sort of a small family business,” the violinist said. The label was begun with a simple business plan: use the proceeds from the last recording used to pay for the next. “I feel very lucky that so far we’ve been able to do that.”

A big surprise for the violinist’s longtime fans is that he has brought a lighter-sounding, period-performance approach to his playing of the Bach solo Sonatas and Partitas. “I feel like now is probably the most rewarding time ever to be studying Bach, to be playing Bach, to be listening to Bach, because we have had so much research about it, and so, for example, I love the recordings of (Dutch conductor) Ton Koopman (and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) of the Orchestral Suites (BWV 1066-8). So, I began experimenting. I guess it’s part of my mid-life crisis.”

To play these works, he reconfigures his 1699 Stradivarius with a baroque-style bridge made by New York luthier Adam Crane and gut instead of the usual steel strings, and he employs a Baroque-style bow commissioned from New York bow maker Markus Laine. At the same time, Shaham has incorporated such period-performance practices as less vibrato and faster tempos. “Some people have been surprised at my tempi, and I understand that. I certainly am playing much of this music faster than I used to, and I’m convinced for now that I’m happier with it.”

As he delved into Bach’s solo Sonatas and Partitas, Shaham said the spirit of experimentation in the music rubbed off on him and he began thinking about possible new ways to present this music. He realized today’s audiences do not understand many of the cultural references that would have come naturally for Bach’s contemporaries, such as what a bourrée is and how the music for it sounds.

So he wanted to provide new entry points into these works for twenty-first-century audiences. That’s when he thought of Michalek’s installation, Slow Dancing, which he saw in the Lincoln Center Plaza in 2007 and realized might be just the vehicle he was looking for. “I thought the way he shot his films was so beautiful, and especially the way he used time, the play with light and time, and I thought that could easily lend itself to music.”

The two first met at Café Luxembourg, near Lincoln Center, and quickly hit it off. It helped that Michalek was a fan of Bach and owned several recordings of the solo violin works. They later got together for further discussion at Michalek’s apartment, with the two of them sitting on the floor of the artist’s little library – Shaham breaking down the structure of the sonatas and partitas and playing examples on his violin, and Michalek showing excerpts from his other works. Soon their collaboration was firmly under way.

As an outgrowth of projects like Slow Dancing, Michalek does commissioned family portraits using a similar slow-motion technology. One day, he visited a client’s house, where one of his filmed diptychs of boys ages six and eight happened to be running at the same time that a recording of cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing a Bach solo suite was playing. To the artist, it appeared that the boys were having a response to the music he was hearing, and watching them and listening at the same time enhanced his appreciation of the music.

“It didn’t seem to damage to music,” he said. “It didn’t seem to fight with it. It was just a very simple mechanism that allowed me to get into a sort of state of active listening that I could sustain. Not that I can’t sustain it without the image. But it helped me do it differently, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a way in.’”

Michalek set about creating short slow-motion videos to accompany each section of the six Bach works. The high-definition videos will be projected behind Shaham on screens that will vary in size depending on the venues where he performs. Michalek’s technical director will travel with the violinist and oversee the presentation of the visual imagery, which has to be manually queued to the duration of the violinist’s playing.

In all, the artist shot more than two hundred fifty takes, and he spent recent weeks deciding on which ones to include in the work. Shaham finally had a chance to see the final product earlier this week, and he called it stunning. “I feel very honored to be part of David’s vision in this project,” he said. “I think it’s a testament to Bach that the power of his music transcends centuries and cultures and mediums and inspires people.”

Frank Music Company has supplied classical sheet music to generations of instrumentalists, singers and composers. On Friday, 6 March 2015, the retail store will close its doors for good, succumbing to dwindling sales.

Frank Music has been struggling for years, as music became readily available online, said Heidi Rogers, the shop’s owner. “We went from seeing fifteen to twenty people per day to seeing two or three,” Ms. Rogers said on Monday. “I went from feeling like I was at the center of the world to feeling invisible.” The store, on West 54th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, opened in 1937 and provided the city’s musicians scores from the standard – Bach, Beethoven – to the arcane. Ms. Rogers bought it in 1978.

Frank Music is the last store in the city dedicated to selling classical sheet music, Ms. Rogers said, although other places such as the Juilliard School’s bookstore at Lincoln Center have it on their shelves.

Frank Music’s stock, which Ms. Rogers counts as hundreds of thousands of scores, was purchased by an anonymous donor as a gift for the Colburn School, a music conservatory in Los Angeles. The school and Ms. Rogers declined to comment on financial details. Colburn School’s president and chief executive, Sel Kardan, called Frank Music’s scores “an invaluable resource for our students and faculty for years to come.”

To the sixty-three-year-old Ms. Rogers, nothing is more important than the arts. “The idea that classical music is irrelevant is ridiculous,” she said, bemoaning the comparative salaries of tubists and stockbrokers. “People should be paid in terms of what they contribute to people’s well being.” The store’s celebrity clients over the years have included pianists Emanuel Ax and Jeremy Denk, violinist Pamela Frank and cellist David Finckel. One of Ms. Rogers’s favorite memories is a telephone call from the violinist Itzhak Perlman, asking for Kreisler scores.

The composer Bruce Adolphe, who is resident lecturer at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, described the store as a musical meeting ground. “Frank’s Music was not just a store but a crucible,” he said, “a nexus where musicians from Suzuki beginners and their parents, to Joshua Bell, or the Brentano’s Mark Steinberg, would meet by chance.” Its closing is perhaps the latest example of classical music’s changing brick-and-mortar businesses.

Joseph Patelson Music House, another longtime sheet-music establishment, closed in 2009, and Dowling Music shut its doors in 2013. Last year, J&R Music and Computer World, the last store in New York with a sizable classical CD section, stopped carrying classical albums.

Musicians have plenty of online opportunities to buy sheet music, whether from Amazon.com, publishers or specialty websites such as Sheet Music Plus. The website IMSLP, a digital library of public-domain music, allows users to download scores for free. Some musicians with iPads have dispensed with pesky paper scores altogether.

For now, Ms. Rogers plans to pack up the rest of the store’s contents and then spend some time on her farm in the Catskills, where she has tenant farmers and fifty chickens. “Everyone says, ‘Aren’t you going to have a party?’ ” she said. “I feel like having a funeral.”

The construction of Neve Shalom Synagogue, the central and largest Sephardic synagogue in the Galata neighborhood of Istanbul, today encompassed by the Beyoğlu district, was completed in 1951 by architects Elyo Ventura and Bernar Motola. At its opening, Chief Rabbi Rav Rafael Saban expressed his wish that it would be “not only a place to pray, but a place where the rich and poor, the young and old, the ignorant and the learned could gather and meet in a spirit of brotherhood and sincere equality.” In 1992 a prayer of thanks was offered to the Turkish nation on the five hundredth anniversary of their acceptance of the Jewish refugees who had been driven from their original homes into these new lands.

On 26 February 2015, as part of the the music series “Bach Before & After,” Sigiswald Kuijken will present a program featuring Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas (BWV 1001-6) at Neve Shalom Synagogue.

For some five centuries the trio has been the true test of an organist. The mode of playing in which each hand takes a single voice while the feet are responsible for the bass line had already enjoyed a long history before the 1720s when Johann Sebastian Bach set about revolutionizing the genre. The early modern German masters of organ polyphony, chief among them the blind virtuoso Arnolt Schlick, honed their virtuosity in three-part textures interweaving independent lines; in contrast to the sometimes overwhelming effect of their more expansive polyphonic experiments of six (or more) parts, the trio produced a contrapuntal fabric whose clarity not only allowed for the expression of nuance, but also exposed the slightest technical or musical weakness in the performer.

Schlick and has contemporaries had treated the organ trio largely as if it were a vocal piece, with little crossing of the voices and only short bursts of figuration or ornament. Bach almost certainly knew none of the trios of Schlick’s generation, although he was acquainted with numerous seventeenth-century examples of three-part writing at the organ, likewise derived essentially from vocal models. But Bach’s trios bear only a distant relation to their precursors, instead meeting, and often surpassing, the technical demands of contemporary ensemble trio sonatas of his time. Using all four limbs, one virtuosic organist had to do the duties of three instrumental virtuosos.

The organ was the ultimate tool for such an undertaking. The central German instruments known to Bach were equipped with an array of registers that imitated contemporary strings and woodwinds. In Bach’s trios each hand was assigned to a separate keyboard and therefore a distinct sound, while the feet had yet another in the pedal. The treble lines might be rendered as if on oboe and violin, or as a pair of complementary flutes above the bass, or in any number of combinations from the endless possibilities offered by Bach’s organs.

With the aid of such a palette of colors, Bach could make the trio sing. But he could also make it dance. His trios were as much physical as musical: the organist’s entire body had to be attuned to the pathos and sweetness of adagios and the insouciant athleticism of allegros. This physicality was a crucial part of Bach’s musical identity, and contemporaries and students praised the speed and accuracy of his feet, either alone, or with his hands. His obituary published in 1754 – a document whose title described the deceased expressly as “A World Famous Organist” – claimed that, “With his two feet, [Bach] could play things on the pedals that many not unskillful clavier players would find it bitter enough to have to play with five fingers.” The essential feature of German organ playing was the independence required of hands and feet, in contrast to the mostly supportive underpinning provided by the pedals of other European traditions. This independence was exposed at its most relentless and most refined in Bach’s trios.

The main sources for the six Trio Sonatas (BWV 525-530) are two manuscripts stemming from the Bach family: an autograph copy probably made around 1727; and another copy in the hand of Anna Magdalena Bach, later divided and the missing section then re-copied by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. These manuscripts suggest just how important the trios were in the musical life of the Bach family and Bach’s students, not least in the formation of one of the greatest organists of the next generation – Bach’s first son, Wilhelm Friedemann. After J. S. Bach’s death, the organ trios were held up as the ultimate test of true organ playing. In the list of organ works in Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s 1802 Bach biography, a work that relied largely on information gathered from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Wilhelm Friedemann, the trios “for two claviers and obbligato pedals” come as the final entry, and the prime carrier of Bach’s musical and familial legacy: “Bach composed [the trios] for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, who, by practicing them, had to prepare himself to become the great performer on the organ that he afterward was. It is impossible to say enough of their beauty. They were composed when the author was in his most mature age and may be considered as his chief work of this description.” A later eighteenth-century history of Leipzig’s Thomasschule praised Bach as the greatest organist of his day and described Wilhelm Friedemann as the son who inherited the organ art most directly. The account goes on to claim that Bach’s organ music “surpassed all that had previously been written for the instrument.” The trios were the clearest expression of a technique that demanded unwavering independence: “the left hand had to be as capable as the right, and he treated the pedal as its own voice.” Other Bach devotees praised the timeless modernity of the trios; some three decades after his father’s death C. P. E. Bach asserted that the trios “are written in such galant style that they still sound very good, and never grow old, but on the contrary will outlive all revolutions of fashion in music.” For C. P. E. Bach the collection was the crowning proof of the pedal’s importance in organ playing.

But for all their galant finesse, there are pitfalls at every turn and the slightest hitch will be noticed. Things can go immediately and irrevocably wrong as in no other genre: it is impossible to fake your way through a trio sonata movement.

None of this is to gainsay the impact and difficulty of Bach’s great preludes and fugues. Because my performance of the six sonatas had to be divided between two CDs, I took the opportunity to enclose each of the two sets of three sonatas with one of Bach’s monumental free works. Bach himself adopted this conceit at least once, framing the magisterial collection of chorale preludes of the Clavierübung III (1739) with the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major (BWV 552). Bach would certainly not have minded that work’s removal from its original published context so that the prelude could introduce the first trio sonata (BWV 525) in the same key, and the fugue provide an apocalyptic peroration after the sprightly last movement of the D-minor sonata (BWV 527).

When considered in light of Bach’s vaunted (and sometimes vilified) taste for harmonic and contrapuntal complexity, the six sonatas are not especially rich in chromaticism or shocking intervallic relations. There are unforgettable exceptions: among the most arresting is the stabbing angularity of the second fugal theme in the third movement of the C minor Sonata (BWV 526/3); and the half-steps descending amidst arabesques at the close of the middle movement of the final sonata (BWV 530/2). The generally diatonic harmonic approach (even if inflected with many unexpected Bachian turns and twists) and the cantabile profile of the themes led C. P. E. Bach to cherish the collection’s galant refinement.

Any deficiencies in the Bachian diet of chromaticism are made up for with the Prelude and Fugue in E minor (BWV 548); the prelude establishes the key of the ensuing sonata in E minor (BWV 528), and the fugue offers a sprawling coda after the final movement, a bright fugal frolic, of the last sonata in G Major (BWV 530). The angular chromaticism of the subject of the great “Wedge” fugue is itself singular: thrillingly transgressive, the piece is not a retreat from fashion and favor but a challenge to both. Heard against such sublime experiments, the trio sonatas can hardly be accused of pandering to prevailing fashion but instead show that the task of training organists in the art of four-limbed performance can be, in Bach’s hands and feet, a tremendously imaginative and challenging exercise in gracefulness and poise, both musical and physical.

As music critics assemble their best-of 2014 lists, another, probably very different barometer of musical taste has been revealed. Billboard has reported that, for the second year in a row, the top-selling classical artists were the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, a community of nuns from rural Missouri.

The sisters’ Lent at Ephesus and Angels and Saints at Ephesus – collections of ancient chants and hymns – were the first- and second-best selling traditional classical albums of 2014 (the traditional classical category excludes crossover releases, according to Billboard). Lent at Ephesus sold about thirty-four thousand copies this year and spent thirty-eight weeks on the chart. Angels came in second place with twenty thousand copies over forty-five weeks. Billboard’s rankings are based on sales data for the year’s top sellers compiled by Nielsen Music.

While interest in chant and spirituality has been a cyclical phenomenon in the recording industry – and almost entirely separate from the classical concert world – 2014 saw interest in this category grow. Other top-selling sacred albums included the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s He Is Risen, an Easter-themed collection (no. 4 on the traditional classical chart); Rumi Symphony Project: Untold, by classical Iranian composer Hafez Nazeri (no. 10), and Mater Eucharistiae, by the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, a monastic order outside of Ann Arbor, MI (no. 11).

There’s another, even broader measurement of popularity to consider: When factoring in crossover music, Billboard’s most popular classical album of 2014 was Shatter Me by the pop violinist and YouTube sensation Lindsay Stirling.

At the age of eighteen, Bach was offered the job of organist at St. Boniface Church in Arnstadt. In spite of a rather generous salary for so young a musician, he bristled at the poor quality of singers in his choir and the appointment only lasted a few years. In October 1705, Bach requested leave to travel to the northern city of Lübeck to hear the great organist and composer, Dieterich Buxtehude, and “take in all I can of his art.” Granted four weeks off, he set out for Lübeck to meet his idol, traversing the 260 miles in early winter and reportedly on foot! Instead of a month, Bach ended up staying three months before returning to Arnstadt a changed man; he had found his inspiration.

While Bach undoubtedly longed to meet the famous organist, Buxtehude’s Abendmusik concerts at St. Mary Church were likely what precipitated the teenaged Bach’s road trip. Under Buxtehude’s watch, the Abendmusik concerts – privately funded musical programs featuring a highly skilled group of municipal players performing stunning, new instrumental and vocal works by the town’s famous music master – had developed into significant annual attractions. In 1697, several years before Bach’s visit, a travel writer noted the organist and his concerts as one of Lübeck’s principal draws:

On the west side, between the two pillars under the towers, one can see the large and magnificent organ, which, like the small organ, is now presided over by the world-famous organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude. Of particular note is the great Abend-Music, consisting of pleasant vocal and instrumental music, presented yearly on five Sundays between St. Martin’s and Christmas, following the Sunday Vespers sermon, from 4 to 5 o’clock, by the aforementioned organist as director, in an artistic and praiseworthy manner. This happens nowhere else.

Though not bound by liturgical concerns, the Abendmusiken occurred each year on the final two Sundays of Trinity and first three Sundays of Advent, so roughly once a week from throughout November and December, excluding the week of Christmas. The events had begun under the stewardship of Buxtehude’s predecessor, Franz Tunder, but developed considerably in the late seventeenth century and continued long after Buxtehude’s death. In 1752, one writer recounted the history of the concerts, especially their development over the years from humble beginnings:

In former times the citizenry, before going to the stock market, had the praiseworthy custom of assembling in St. Mary Church, and the organist [Tunder] sometimes played something on the organ for their pleasure, to pass the time and to make himself popular with the citizenry. This was well received, and several rich people, who were also lovers of music, gave him gifts. The organist was thus encouraged, first to add a few violins and then singers as well, until finally it had become a large performance, which was moved to the aforementioned Sundays of Trinity and Advent. The famous organist Diederich Buxtehude decorated the Abendmusiken magnificently already in his day. His successor, Mr. Schiefferdecker, did not fail to maintain the reputation of these concerts and even augment it. But our admirable Mr. Kuntze has brought them to the highest level. He has gotten the most famous singers [both male and female] from the Hamburg opera; he has even employed Italian women.

Like most musically inclined Germans in the early 1700s, Bach knew about the Abendmusk concerts and undoubtedly timed his visit to Lübeck accordingly. He also must have known that a four-week leave would not be adequate to fully take in the concerts, but he failed to mention this detail before leaving. Bach was not entirely happy with his post in Arnstadt, so missing more than a month of work bothered him less than it upset his employers. Interestingly, however, when Bach returned and was reprimanded, his most serious offense was not his AWOL status; it was for introducing strange notes and musical gestures into his services in January and February 1706! The experience of hearing and playing Buxtehude’s music in the Abendmusiken (some have suggested that he performed in some of the concerts) had inspired Bach and directly influenced his musical voice and ambition.

Antonio Stradivari, the master violin maker whose instruments sell for millions of dollars today, has been dead for nearly three centuries. Only six hundred fifty of his instruments are estimated to survive. But the forest where the luthier got his lumber is alive and well. And thanks to the surprising teamwork of modern instrument makers and forest rangers, Stradivari’s trees are doing better than ever.

These spruce trees have been growing for hundreds of years in the Fiemme Valley, the same corner of the Italian Alps where Renaissance luthiers such as Stradivari, Guarneri and Amati hand-picked the trees that would be turned into some of the world’s finest instruments. Thanks to a serendipitous combination of climate and altitude, these have come to be called “Il bosco che suona” – The Musical Woods.

Marcello Mazzucchi, a retired forest ranger with an uncanny knack for spotting timber that’s ideal for instruments, walks among the trees, tapping on their trunks. Mazzucchi’s skill has led some to call him “The Tree Whisperer,” but he laughs off that nickname. “I’m really more of a tree listener,” he says. “I observe, I touch them, sometimes I even hug them. Look carefully and they’ll tell you their life story, their traumas, their joys, everything. Such humble creatures.”

He goes from trunk to trunk, crossing flawed candidates off his list. “This one over here was struck by lightning,” he says. “Who knows what kind of sound its violin would make?” Then he finds a contender: “It shoots up perfectly straight. It’s very cylindrical. No branches at the bottom. If you ask me, there’s a violin trapped inside.”

Mazzucchi takes out a manual drill called a borer, and twists it like a corkscrew through the bark. He listens carefully to the knocking sound the borer makes each time it hits a new tree ring. Pulling out a core sample shaped like a pencil, he concludes the tree is an excellent specimen. A lumberjack chops down trees like this one and carts them to a lumberyard nearby, where the spruce is milled into sections.

Local instrument maker Cecilia Piazzi examines a piece of that milled wood, and declares it “magnificent.” “We use it for making the table – that’s the beautiful part on the front of a violin or cello, with the soundholes on the surface,” Piazzi says. “Yes, this piece is the right piece. I can tell just by flicking it.”

It takes months to complete a single instrument, which can cost over $10,000 – a bargain, when you consider a Stradivarius that came from the same forest can go for over $10 million. But it’s enough to keep this community humming. The Fiemme Valley is one of Italy’s most prosperous areas, thanks in large part to these musical woods. And it’s going to stay that way, because people like the Tree Whisperer take care of it. “I’ve felled one million trees in my career,” Mazzucchi says. “But in their place, 100 million more have grown up.”

Before a tree hits the chopping block, Mazzucchi looks around to see if there are any tiny saplings struggling to grow nearby. If so, removing an adult tree will let more sun in and actually help the babies mature. Bruno Cosignani, the head of the local forest service, explains that light is the limiting factor on tree growth. “As soon as a tree falls down, those who were born and suffering in the shadows can start to grow more quickly,” he says. And centuries from now, those trees, too, might become musical instruments.

The First Sunday of Advent begins the liturgical year, and three hundred years ago in Weimar, on 2 December 1714, Bach marked the occasion by performing the six-movement cantata Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (BWV 61). Written for a small ensemble consisting of soprano, tenor, and bass soloists, a four-part chorus, two violins, two violas and basso continuo, the cantata text, combining the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem with his promise to enter the heart of the individual Christian, was provided by Erdmann Neumeister.

On 16 October 2014, the Kuijken Ensemble will perform at St. Anthony of Padua Church in Istanbul as part of the Turkish capital’s yearly Bach Days.

Violinist Sigiswald Kuijken will be joined by harpsichordist Benjamin Alard and soprano Marie Kuijken in the program “Towards Bach” that will feature works by Castello, Monteverdi, Scheidemann and Purcell as well as Bach’s Sonata (BWV 1019) and the soprano arias Genügsamkeit (from BWV 144), Seufzer, Tränen, Kummer, Not (from BWV 21) and Ich ende behende (from BWV 57).

St. Anthony of Padua Church, a minor basilica, was built in the early twentieth century by the local Italian community. Before he was elected to the papacy, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was attached to the church when he was the Vatican‘s ambassador to Turkey.

Christopher Hogwood, whose Academy of Ancient Music was a key ensemble in the period-instrument movement, striving to perform early music as the composer intended and as audiences were first presumed to have heard it, died on 24 September 2014 at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 73.

Mr. Hogwood, a conductor, harpsichordist and scholar for whom an “authentic sound” was paramount, co-founded the Early Music Consort, which focused on medieval and Renaissance music, in 1967, but the paucity of information regarding historically accurate performance styles troubled him. The Academy, which he established in 1973 as “as a sort of refugee operation for those players of period instruments who wanted to escape conductors,” initially focused on seventeenth and eighteenth-century music. While praised for their buoyancy and stylishness, his interpretations were also sometimes criticized as dry and unemotional.

Mr. Hogwood’s more than two hundred recordings include the complete Mozart symphonies and the complete Mozart piano concertos, with the pianist Robert Levin.

Mr. Hogwood, who early in his career played continuo in Neville Marriner’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, was once referred to as “the von Karajan of early music” – a reference to Herbert von Karajan, who in addition to being one of the twentieth century’s most important conductors was a famously imperious personality. In a phone interview, the violinist Pavlo Beznosiuk, a member of the Academy of Ancient Music since 1984, disagreed; in fact, he said, “Anyone less like von Karajan is hard to imagine.” Mr. Hogwood, he added, “was very collaborative and always happy to defer to the musicians if they had a better idea.”

During a concert in 2011 at Alice Tully Hall, where he directed Juilliard415, the school’s period-instrument ensemble, Mr. Hogwood announced to the audience, “Instead of standing here, anachronistically waving my arms, I’ll join you.” He then left the stage and took a seat in the hall to listen.

Early in his tenure as the artistic director of the Boston-based Handel and Haydn Society, which lasted from 1986 to 2001, Mr. Hogwood converted the ensemble to an exclusively period-instrument group. The Society’s major collaborations included a staging of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice with the Mark Morris Dance Group as well as projects with the jazz pianists Dave Brubeck and Chick Corea. Mr. Hogwood had a particular affinity for Mendelssohn and was scheduled to conduct the composer’s Elijah in March 2015 with the Handel and Haydn Society.

In 2008 he became director emeritus of the Academy of Ancient Music, succeeded by the harpsichordist Richard Egarr.

In addition to period ensembles, Mr. Hogwood led orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony. He also conducted opera, including Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at La Scala in 2006; among the operas he recorded were Handel’s Agrippina, Alceste, Orlando and Rinaldo. He also conducted the works of more modern composers like Stravinsky, Copland and Tippett.

Mr. Hogwood wrote several books, including a biography of Handel first published in 1984 and revised in 2007, and prepared many scholarly editions of scores, which he used for his own performances, often correcting previously published mistakes.

He held academic positions at the Royal Academy of Music, King’s College London, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Cornell and Gresham College, London.

Christopher Jarvis Haley Hogwood was born in Nottingham, England, on 10 September 1941, the son of Haley and Marion Hogwood. His father was a physicist, his mother a secretary for the International Labour Organization. He studied literature and music at Pembroke College, Cambridge; his harpsichord teachers included Gustav Leonhardt.

Some musicians and scholars now believe that modern instruments allow for greater interpretive possibilities than original instruments – that the wonders of Bach’s music, for example, can be best illustrated on a modern piano. But according to Mr. Hogwood, “the theory that Mozart’s music was simply awaiting the invention of the Steinway is wrong.”

In a recent interview with The Juilliard Journal, Mr. Hogwood said: “You can play things stylishly on the wrong instruments or unstylishly on the right instruments; I hope we’ll get it stylish on the right instruments. It’s just clearing the way so that people hear them as the composer intended, and if he wasn’t a complete idiot, the way he intended is presumably the correct way for them.”